The speed is the main factor to rank the website in Google and search engines. The more your website speed is the higher it will rank. So you need to take care of speed as the utmost priority while optimizing the website. So, how do you improve the WordPress website speed? I am going to tell you.
In this guide, we’ll discuss exactly why it’s important to make your site load as fast as possible. We’ll take a look at some common factors that can slow down your WordPress site and what you can do to optimize it and make sure it’s running smoothly.
Why the Speed of Your WordPress site Matters?
- People do not like waiting for pages to load. This is especially true for mobile users who are used to lightning fast load times.
- They leave the site if it’s slow.
- Search Engines rank faster sites high
You an check the speed of your website using GTmetrix
I recommend using few other speed testing tools because it may give you different results based on testing server location and other factors they use to calculate the speed. Like for example when I test with Pingdom website speed test tool, it gave me poorer result as below:
Google has it’s own Google PageSpeed Insights tool which you can use to analyse your website speed in Mobile and Desktop.
There are some other page speed tools you can try out too – WebPageTest is the most flexible, but Pingdom and GTmetrix are also popular. Try running the tests a few times at different times of the day to get a true picture of the average load time of your site. We also recommend testing with different devices and from different locations (if you have a global audience).
These testing sites will show the recommendations on how you can speed up the site so you can fix it to increase the website speed accordingly.
What is Making Your WordPress Website Slow?
Some of the most common causes for slow WordPress website are:
- Slow and crap web hosting server
- Large, uncompressed images
- Bloated themes and plugins that are poorly coded
- Too many plugins and the deactivated and not used ones also
- Too many external scripts or advertizements on the page
- Slow loading third-party embedded content such as social media and video feeds.